Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - Friday October 23, 1998
Abigail Schmelz
Police were focusing their search for the suspect, who they said was probably an Iranian citizen living under a false identity, on Stockholm after a tip he may have returned to the area.
"The tip is very interesting and I hope it will lead to a quick result," Stockholm detective Christer Sjoblom said.
Earlier reports suggested the man had fled to Denmark.
The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter said 80 women had taken HIV tests and 40 of them had received negative results. One woman is known to have received the virus from the man, police said Thursday.
Hundreds of women were horrified when police broke the strict Swedish privacy law and published the name and photograph of an HIV-positive man who claimed his name was James Kimball.
"We have spoken to 120 women who said they had sex with him," Sjoblom told Reuters.
This was after police found an address book belonging to the man -- wanted on a rape charge -- in a raid on his Stockholm apartment. The notebook contained the names of about 200 Swedish women aged around 20 with ratings of their sexual performance.
Police said the man, who had lived in Sweden since 1992, was probably a 25-year-old Iranian and might have stolen the identity of Kimball, a dead American.
The Iranian was wanted in the United States for fraud and receiving stolen goods. He emigrated to Sweden because he had a Swedish girlfriend and obtained permits to stay.
He worked at odd jobs such as a taxi driver, lured women to bed with tales that he was a model, arranged glamorous parties and spoke fluent French. There have been cases in Sweden of men with the AIDS virus infecting several women, but not such a large number.
The man could face four years in prison if convicted of rape and one to 10 years for knowingly infecting women with AIDS.
Last year a Finnish court sentenced an American to 14 years in prison on 17 charges of attempted manslaughter for having unprotected sex even though he knew he had the AIDS virus.
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